News & Features

As the first recipient of a self-contained artificial heart enters his fourth week with the device, his surgeons say his recovery continues to exceed their expectations. The hopeful news raises a critical question: who will be the next to receive an AbioCor implant? In human experimentation,...

When Dr. Laman A. Gray Jr. and Dr. Robert D. Dowling implanted the first self-contained, battery-powered artificial heart in a patient at Jewish Hospital here last week, it was the second time in 16 years that Louisville had been vaulted into the news by experiments with an artificial heart. In...

Surgeons who implanted the first self-contained artificial heart on Monday said today that so far the patient's recovery had vastly exceeded their expectations. The surgeons strongly cautioned that the procedure was an experiment in which a complication could occur at any time because of the...

IN a cramped room at the Mount Sinai Hospital's Cardiac Care Center, time is marked by the loud, mechanical beating of Louis Fantauzzi's artificial heart. It is the sound of a tethered life, a life in suspension. Now in his fifth month of waiting for a real heart, Mr. Fantauzzi embraces...

DR. MICHAEL E. DeBAKEY moved like a dancer in a pas de deux, anticipating his surgical partner's every move during a quadruple bypass operation on a woman at the Methodist Hospital here recently. As Dr. DeBakey deftly manipulated scalpels, scissors and forceps for more than three hours, his hands...

In the same immaculately clean, high-technology operating room at the Cardiology Center here where Boris N. Yeltsin is expected to undergo heart bypass surgery in the next few weeks, his surgeon, Dr. Renat S. Akchurin, performed a similar operation on a 36-year-old man on Thursday. Looking on,...

A 33-YEAR-OLD man in Houston has become the first person with a failing heart to recover with a portable, battery-powered heart assist device. The device has been approved for experimental implant in three more patients. Further success could eventually help tens of thousands of Americans who...

For the first time, surgeons have implanted a fully portable mechanical device to help a patient's failing heart pump until a heart donor can be found. The operation, which took place Thursday in Houston, was an important step toward the development of a totally implantable artificial heart,...

The Food and Drug Administration has given a Houston hospital approval to begin experimental use of a portable, battery-powered mechanical device to help a failing heart pump blood until a heart donor can be found. With the new device, the damaged organ stays in place. After the pump is...

LEAD: In an action that stunned heart researchers, the Food and Drug Administration has withdrawn its approval of continued experimental use of the Jarvik artificial heart because of deficiencies found in its manufacture.